same degree of importance in each case.  I dare say, if a peeress had come to visit us at the Hall, the covers would have been taken off the furniture in the white drawing-room (they never were uncovered all the time I stayed at the Hall), because my lady would wish to offer her the ornaments and luxuries which this grand visitor (who never came—­I wish she had!  I did so want to see that furniture uncovered!) was accustomed to at home, and to present them to her in the best order in which my lady could.  The same rule, mollified, held good with Miss Galindo.  Certain things, in which my lady knew she took an interest, were laid out ready for her to examine on this very day; and, what was more, great books of prints were laid out, such as I remembered my lady had had brought forth to beguile my own early days of illness,—­Mr. Hogarth’s works, and the like,—­which I was sure were put out for Miss Bessy.

No one knows how curious I was to see this mysterious Miss Bessy—­twenty times more mysterious, of course, for want of her surname.  And then again (to try and account for my great curiosity, of which in recollection I am more than half ashamed), I had been leading the quiet monotonous life of a crippled invalid for many years,—­shut up from any sight of new faces; and this was to be the face of one whom I had thought about so much and so long,—­Oh!  I think I might be excused.

Of course they drank tea in the great hall, with the four young gentlewomen, who, with myself, formed the small bevy now under her ladyship’s charge.  Of those who were at Hanbury when first I came, none remained; all were married, or gone once more to live at some home which could be called their own, whether the ostensible head were father or brother.  I myself was not without some hopes of a similar kind.  My brother Harry was now a curate in Westmoreland, and wanted me to go and live with him, as eventually I did for a time.  But that is neither here nor there at present.  What I am talking about is Miss Bessy.

After a reasonable time had elapsed, occupied as I well knew by the meal in the great hall,—­the measured, yet agreeable conversation afterwards,—­and a certain promenade around the hall, and through the drawing-rooms, with pauses before different pictures, the history or subject of each of which was invariably told by my lady to every new visitor,—­a sort of giving them the freedom of the old family-seat, by describing the kind and nature of the great progenitors who had lived there before the narrator,—­I heard the steps approaching my lady’s room, where I lay.  I think I was in such a state of nervous expectation, that if I could have moved easily, I should have got up and run away.  And yet I need not have been, for Miss Galindo was not in the least altered (her nose a little redder, to be sure, but then that might only have had a temporary cause in the private crying I know she would have had before coming to see her dear Lady Ludlow once again).  But I could almost have pushed Miss Galindo away, as she intercepted me in my view of the mysterious Miss Bessy.